Sunday, March 11, 2012

"Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right" (2012)

Rating:

★★★★

Category:

Books

Genre:

Nonfiction

Author:

Thomas Frank

In 2003, Thomas Frank (a former writer for "The Wall Street Journal" who contributes to Harper's and other periodicals) previously penned the insightful "What's the Matter With Kansas?" A best-selling tome that traced how one American midwest state changed from being a hot-bed of progressive politics in the 1900's to a bastion of conservatism a century later.

Frank has now written a book to explain one of the knotty problems of recent US politics: how the free-market, hard line de-regulators of corporate capitalism (the GOP) emerged as the dominant party in the 2010 Elections s despite the tremendous losses in the economy just two years earlier under the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Mr. Frank shows in short and snappy prose how the far right revitalized itself and used corporate power to finance a lightning-fast conservative revival with the help of former Bush campaign guru Karl Rove, former Congressman Dick Armey's lobbying prowess and the money from the likes of billionaire Charles Koch and his brother in an alliance to "change the story" of the Wall Street banking crash and the mortgage crisis into a government plot rather than a failure of the heights of investment macro-capitalism and shady schemes like the credit-default swap and toxic securities games that led to the worst downfall in economic US history since the Crash of 1929 and subsequent free-fall.

Frank's book follows the rise of the American Tea Party and its appeal to the simple and accessible heartland-narrative that everything the government does is wrong and all regulations are bad because they hurt "small" business (i.e., multi-national banking and financial speculators and bond and futures traders.) Frank spends a good deal of the book showing the rise of unlikely "populists" like the commentator Glenn Beck and the enduring power of the super-capitalist propaganda writer Ayn Rand to help explain the "intellectual energy" behind the movement.

This book is a very good analysis of how the right wing of America continues to regroup over and over again (for the fourth time in forty years if you count the rise of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" in 1968, The Reagan "Revolution" of the 1980s and Newt Gingrich and the "Contract With America" movement in 1994.) Counting the recent upsurge in 2010 and its apparent that, like clockwork, every dozen years or so, a "thunder on the right" campaign emerges from the boardrooms and think-tanks of the American rightward establishment. And, s far, each time said movement is more radical rather than conservative than the last movement. So radical indeed that previous leaders like Nixon and Reagan would be considered too soft to lead the movements they inspired not so long ago.

"Rather than acknowledge that they had enjoyed thirty years behind the wheel, they declared that they had never really got their turn in the first place. The true believers had never actually been in charge, the “Conservative Ascendancy” never really existed—and therefore, the disastrous events of recent years cast no discredit on conservative ideas themselves. The solution was not to reconsider conservative dogma; it was to double down, to work even more energetically for the laissez-faire utopia.

"Pure idealism of this sort is unusual in American politics, however, and the jaded men of the commentariat sat back and waited for the system to punish the wayward ones, for the magnetic pull of the “center” to work its corrective magic. But this time the gods didn’t intervene in the usual way. In 2010, a radicalized GOP scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades.

'The simplest explanation for the conservative comeback is that hard times cause people to lash out at whoever is in power. In 2010, that happened to be Democrats. Ergo, their rivals staged a comeback. But surely the two parties are not simply interchangeable, like Coke and Pepsi. They are able to control their own fate to some degree, to differentiate themselves from each other. Besides, history provides enough examples of public sentiment moving consistently in a particular direction to show that it need not always flop aimlessly back and forth."

Yet flop the average "independent voter" who bothered to vote in 2010 did--flopping right back into the main party that led the way (along with pliable semi-conservative Democrats) to the sub-prime mortgage/toxic securitization scams that put us in trouble in the first place!

Oh, well. At least I feel better having read this engaging 187 page book. I now at least understand better how the swindlers operated.

18 comments:

The presidential election can only be a choice between one corporate mouthpiece or another I think Doug. All this deregulation rhetoric is strictly for those seeking power rather than those holding it. If you don't believe in elected representatives don't stand for office, you'd think it was pretty easy to grasp wouldn't you, but these anti-statist libertarians will be be totalitarian dictators once they get their hands on the mechanisms of state power. Just like every fascist before them they are working for the economic hegemony of the mega corporations and the political power to reside firmly in the hands of the mentally unstable fantasists and power craving psychopaths.

I find it hard to believe that politics in America involves any kind of ideological struggle between left or right, just like the UK, America is a one party - consensus politics - privatised virtual state, a constituent part of the hallucinatory and entirely made-up kingdom of Greater Bilderbergia, which is where all the real power lies, paradoxically I think.

The people sure dont have a good memory of what happened when everything was deregulized...oh yeah we should keep doing that again as what the presidential candidates want to do. Really take this country over the cliff and keep the billionairs even richer and keep the rest of the country in poverty. I wish people would open their eyes and clear the minds and stop smoking the crap that makes them stupid.I have not read the book and cant get the stars off...lol

The so-called left in the US is the equivalent of everyone else's right I think - there really is no left wing there and so it is no wonder that the far, far right continues its ascendency. "Pity the [poor] Billionaire" indeed, what a title for a book, my heart bleeds for them and their long-lived lack of de-regulated utopia, for the rest of us, let regulation protect us from their evil. Great review Doug, not sure that I feel inspired to read the book, though. I suspect such an attempt would leave holes in my walls as I fling the horrid text in disgust!

Aaran wrote: If you don't believe in elected representatives don't stand for office, you'd think it was pretty easy to grasp wouldn't you, but these anti-statist libertarians will be be totalitarian dictators once they get their hands on the mechanisms of state power. Just like every fascist before them they are working for the economic hegemony of the mega corporations and the political power to reside firmly in the hands of the mentally unstable fantasists and power craving psychopaths."

While I still believe there is some daylight between the political parties on domestic issues, I will continue to be a voter and supporter of the Democrats. Saying that, you are correct that al those who are trying to "free America from government" are also quite willing to enslave us to corporate lobbyists. If the Democrats are wanting, GOP leaders like Romney and Santorum (and the truly mad ones, Gingrich and Ron Paul) are toxic weasels who wouldn't last a week in the opposite party.

The fact is the Republicans deregulation game has driven us off a cliff. I'm hoping that a second thumping at the polls will force at least a section of those party voters to demand pragmatism over radicalism. We shall see.

I certainly hope the political situation in the UK is more promising than here.

On foreign policy matters, though, I'm afraid your diagnosis is dead on and I don't feel like rebutting something I can not disprove. Obama did oppose the start of the war in Iraq, but most Democrats in the Senate did not.

Marty: ...Really take this country over the cliff and keep the billionairs even richer and keep the rest of the country in poverty. I wish people would open their eyes and clear the minds and stop smoking the crap that makes them stupid.I have not read the book and cant get the stars off...lol."

I think people do have remarkably short memories on domestic matters. Part of the problem is that the economic meltdown happened in the late Summer of 2008, just two months before the election that year. As the colummist Gene Lyons pointed out, had the meltdown occurred in 2007 instead of a year later, the Republican Money Machinery might have had a tougher time putting even part of the blame on Obama and the new class of Democrats who came to office. As it is, there are million of people in the Deep South and some of the Rocky mountain states who will never, never, never learn. Just my opinion and I say that will deep respect for their cultural myopia.

Don't worry about the stars Marty. Multiply is a funky site right now. :-)

Iri Ani wrote: "The so-called left in the US is the equivalent of everyone else's right I think - there really is no left wing there and so it is no wonder that the far, far right continues its ascendency. "Pity the [poor] Billionaire" indeed....let regulation protect us from their evil. Great review Doug, not sure that I feel inspired to read the book, though. I suspect such an attempt would leave holes in my walls as I fling the horrid text in disgust!"

I think you're right about the left being a de facto right party compared to all other elected republics, Iri. I sometimes think of an American liberal as not unlike being in the back set of a car on a hillside drive, and discovering the guy behind the wheel has no breaks! Such is the fate of a society who got a little too big a collective ego boost after teh fall of the old USSR and the Eastern Bloc states in the 90's. Some people think Reagan did it all by themselves and thus proved that any socialism (i.e., American liberalism, which isn't ) is a thing of the past. It does me good to see when some friends I know see the light and stop shilling for companies that don't care squat about them, but I'm not always sure that translates on a major scale.

By all means don't read this book if it will compel you to throw it about and damage your walls. Maybe it will come out out in paperback at your local library! :-)

Hehe! That does seem a little bit true. I think that I upset someone the other day because i was a mite anti-Republican. But I'm not really. I'm anti-Right and they are very Right these days. I certainly have no beef with some of the early Republicans who built the USA bravely and honestly.

No, Oakie, I understand. It is not the original Whig and later Republican party leaders of Henry Clay and Abraham Linclon's time--men who in the mid-19th Century believed in building infastructures for education, trade and transportation in the frontier--who have brought the nation and much of the world into this mess.

These new Republicans are really a hybrid of the Robber Baron post-Civil War Republicans--those who thought American business was all we needed---with the old white southern Democrats who deplore central authority, have a topsy-turvy view of the Gospels, and are socially reactionary who have brought us to this pretty pass.